|
They are celebrating his hundredth birthday on two ancient paddle-steamers going up the Nile, and at that point on the second ship, where the party is, no one has noticed the ship's list to port. Present on deck under awnings are one hundred and eighty-one descendants and collaterals of Sir Cy Law: children, wives (current and ex-), smalls running around, a few observers and intimates, a crew of eight Egyptians with dark, ancient faces, and their captain with a three-day stubble, a filthy white cap, and a blue jacket with tarnished buttons. On the chugging steam-vessel up ahead, the William Jefferson Clinton, presumably so called because it too was a sidewinder, were photographers, reporters, film-folk, groupies, fetching girls who had looked for love and handsome boys who had wanted to offer it. The usual all-sorts that feed on celebrity.
Fewer were more famous than my friend Sir Cy Law; none I know of who made it to a hundred and could still pull it off. Molto in gamba he is. Incandescent. A great big florid man currently rigged out as Madam Xango, a tall, svelte black woman in a tight dress and with perfect breasts that she says she acquired one by one in Topeka, Kansas. Tomorrow, or even in a matter of minutes, Cy could be someone else: General Ozanne, Prince Crevalcuore; a patient in a mental hospital who conversed with constellations; Dom Ambrose, monk; Erno and Eleni, the Young Lovers.
It is always best to take him as he is at any given moment. That way, while enjoying whiffs of his personality changes—I am definitely not talking about impersonations he performed on stage or in films—you can keep your bearings: as all the aforementioned people, his progeny, try so hard to do. The very young among them never quite worked out who he was but giggled anyway; the middle ones, the thirty-to-fifties might have been embarrassed but were also inured. It was his oldest son, himself going on seventy and capofamiglia-in-waiting, who occasionally must have found it difficult, as he was then doing, to introduce the old man to a lady reporter from Blick! as his father, when decidedly Madam Xango didn't look at all like anyone's father, but instead was not only womanly, chic, and powerfully perfumed, but also exuded a powerful sexuality.
My name is Edgar Catch. Cy and I go back a long way. Alongside Cy, I suppose you would call me an arrested type. I am short in the leg, concave in the torso, wispy-bearded, foul-mouthed (and dentated), dirt poor (I temp legal documents for a living) and extremely arrogant. Though thirty years his junior, I am his oldest pal: of which he's had plenty. All dead now. In real life—something Cy doesn't know much about—I am a pasigrapher, a polyglot, and a poet. I was born in Mississippi, brought up on an ark chasing a nuclear-free Pacific, am a true believer in the wisdom of Bre'r Rabbit, and a Hebrew and Aramaic scholar It is my belief that the New Testament is based on a lost manuscript of Matthew's. It is a subject I take seriously, and yes—in the interest of full disclosure—I have received largesse from him, including an economy class-ticket to Cairo for this jamboree. Chucking money about is part of his lordly ways; there are accountants, agents and counsel to look after the fall-out. He is fond of me. He puts his arms around me and calls me his dirty friend—well, I am unkempt, spending as I have mentioned, most days at a word processor in Inglenook, California—because I once puked down the front of one of his wives' dresses and stole his fine wines with the lame excuse I was thirsty. Both these blotches on good manners he finds picturesque. The same holds for my attempts, early on in our friendship, to leap on a wife or two of his and several of his daughters. 'You didn't really,' he will gurgle. 'You did? Du bist ein Yoo-Hoo!' That's a Yahoo, and my notes say it was Hannah Arendt who called him that once. And she was educated enough to know better. Yahoos are short on manners.
I reckon he will pardon me my peccadillos if I manage to provide a decent version of his life. He hasn't said as much, at least not lately—he's been in one of those moods inside which people like himself like to dwell ad nauseam on mortality. 'Just fly over,' he had said, sending me a check on an offshore account. 'Check first to see I'm still around.' Ridiculous considering his intolerable health—no dentists, no quacks, no urgencies in years! But before I start—the Nile is a great scene-setter—there are a few things I would like to stipulate.
I don't think, for instance, that I've made it clear what is so famous about him. Okay, here it is. Cy is an actor-knight, a category of honor our British cousins reserve for strolling players already celebrated enough for Her Majesty to wish to enjoy them among dogs and over a gin-and-tonic. Since the collapse of their Empire (not to speak of the Faith which HM is charged with Defending), it is well-known that the nation produces very little that anyone wants. Maybe marmalade, the tartan skirts French girls adore and what is called Financial Services, aka funny money. Among the few exceptions are: their language and their actors, the two being inextricably mixed. But what sort of profession is this for any grown man? William Shakespeare thought actors sorry beings, things of rags and tatters strutting about, and he was right, for such people have no true Selves of their own. They are enslaved to the creations of Playwrights and Screen-Writers. Cy can and has played just about anything or anyone and is inordinately successful in so doing. But it is a calling that takes you right out of yourself and puts you into the sort of territory where a man as ambiguous in his Self as Cy can easily get lost. If you spend a lifetime studying the lines of others and become a bewildering variety of characters of every sex, shade or color—Jewish merchants, demure maidens, melancholics, mad men, dictators, cloistered nuns, pimps, entertainers—what's left of yourself?
You will have been surprised that the lady from Blick!, promised a little entretien with the great man, found herself instead enlaced by a black lady, perfect-breasted and voluble. Because you know that is really Sir Cy Law standing over there talking to Frau Blick! you think you'll be able to see through his disguise; you think you can detect the male jaw-line, the shape of his dewlaps, the protrusion of his ears, and Adam's old apple, the eternal male, obligated to his primitive musculature and Cro-Magnon bone-cracking jaw; and you will say to Edgar Catch, 'You lie Sir! That's not Sir Cy!'
I say you underestimate his transformational skills. You forget that actors such as Cy are quick-change artists. That's why intermissions were invented. Such people grow old before our eyes, or revert to babyhood; they woo boys who are girls and seduce girls who are boys; they are frogs who turn into princes and drabs who wind up queens..
You insist you cannot be taken in. You lose your temper and scoff at Madame Xango. 'Falsies,' you say, incensed, 'do not a woman make. That's drag.'
I say, why does it bother you so much? Where's your belief? Is Bread made into Flesh and Wine into Blood? No one has questioned her breasts who has felt them. Have you ever been in a professional dressing-room where rows of pots, trails of postiches, wigs, extensions, of false eyelashes, creams, tweezers, of wardrobes that house corsets, bodices, cinches, lace and centuries of costume history, enable any change to be achieved? Man, that's alchemy! Cy, I will tell you, is both instantly recognizable and instantly unrecognizable. It is not a matter of impersonating someone he isn't but becoming another human being altogether, complete with history, mentality, looks and total belief, of allowing himself to be translated. How does one cope with that?
The right person to ask is Deirdre, but she is at the moment preoccupied with arrangements. Her husband has to be found in the throng. On that felucca someone is about to toast Sir Cy again, and it would be rude for him not to answer. She's seen glasses raised, even the smalls with their Pepsis in crystal goblets: 'To the next hundred years!'
Hurrah! Hurrah!
Ah, there he is. He seems to be himself again, and holding court. This is the levée du roi. Yes, in his baggy Ottoman trousers of white shantung, his shirt open at the neck, his chest hairless but muscular, he responds to the raised glasses with a royal wave of his hand, which as usual is clasped around a glass of Burgundy. His other hand remains on a much-spotted tablecloth and smoke, for him and for those around him, curls between its fingers. Love the man! Love his defying the rules of the game today. That little white cylinder of paper is his symbol of longevity, and every time he lights up and inhales his own immortality, he lovingly toasts all the hoke-artists who say his fag's going to kill him. Life kills, he says. The Nanny State kills.
Another hundred years? There should be term limits. The Captain makes another fleeting appearance. Does he want Eternal Life as an unshaven river-boat captain, alongside Zinaida his wife of thirty-one years? Here, children scamper noisily, released from their schools and imported Balkan nannies; and two of them dispute whether mummies can come back to life. Outside, oil-lamps flicker on the river-banks. The heat, late spring, is already oppressive and the fans overhead sluggish
Deirdre is friendly but vague, as if she isn't completely aware of the tightrope she's walking along. She looks at Cy fondly. How does he work out who is who, she wonders? She would like to wave to him and see if she's recognized. Commonplace reflections and obvious queries: nothing wrong with that, and women give them a special intensity.
Who is that sitting over there with him? A Monsignor it seems to be, given the swanky cassock trimmed with red and his purple ferraiuolo, the little cape sitting silkily on his shoulders. For a moment she seems to be considering whether he might not be one of the Law children she finds it so hard to keep up with. She shakes her head in thought, which always distracts her from the matter at hand. She has lost count of how many are children and how many grandchildren, but her insides tell her she is ready to add to their number. From which number only the daughters or grand-daughters seem to talk to her much. They stand by her side, look at her slightly askance, as if wondering how long will this one last? is she or isn't she? what are the tell-tale signs? and (with wonder and resignation) is the old man really be still up to it?
She could tell them he is, but then they would worry: pregnancy has always filled out his wives early on and there's much covert competition among the many batches of children resulting therefrom. Such different nurseries! Such variegated upbringings, ranging from Upper Bohemia to the rural Apple Cheek! There was even once a petition from the fetching red-headed. . . (her memory fails her as to the name) demanding NO MORE SIBLINGS PLEASE. At least the women see Deirdre as a member of the same species; whereas it is otherwise with the men. With her long wild tresses and firm body, long striding legs, rose-bloom skin, pouting generous lips, she is still nubile to the males, and abashing: by that selfsame wild streak. They won't come close.
I wonder about the Monsignor myself. And frankly, is it wise to interrupt these centenary jubilee celebrations—they are due to last the better part of a week—to remind you of life's swings and roundabouts? And of Cy's mercurial former, current and perhaps future selves? Of the religious crises which, like the military, the political, the psychological and the amatory, afflicted him? We have Madame Xango waiting in the wings. Well, there is also the Right Reverend Ambrose McQuarrie, OSB, late of Fort Augustus Abbey. And he has a good deal to do with Monsignor Moreno.
For the fact is that years ago, there was a Monsignor Moreno around Inglenook at the time when I had first met Sir Cy. The Monsignor had a flat head under a hard roof of black hair parted at the apex, and wore a long red robe with a big cross on his chest. He was a memorable Mexican among so any who weren't, and my guess is that at the time he was Cy's spiritual director and confessor, the assuager of Cy's troubled soul. For the divine Cy (which is what Agate and others said of his first Shakespearean performances) had a problem with God, which he probably owed to his dead mother's operatic piety. It was a problem that manifested itself as plain old guilt and boring old unworthiness. Monsignor Moreno was the man for him. His calling-card, like his advertised religious retreats, proclaimed him a member of the Supplicant order, whose mission was to beg Jesus to forgive the world.
I am looking back forty years here. 1939 to 1950, Sir Cy had Americanized himself with one of his marriages and begun serious drinking out in Malibu with Raymond Chandler and the rest of the Brit community. Unsteady they may have been, but there was a living to be made: as posh butlers for Fred Astaire, as pirates alongside Errol Flynn. Cy, having expected, and been promised Art, had been shuffled off instead into B-pictures in which he was bravely torpedoed in the Arctic, took his flaming Spitfire into a column of black smoke, or—just after the war—was a parachuted secret agent outfoxed by Jimmy Cagney. In short, he played a lot of roles, but the returns diminished as rapidly as his marriage.
Hence the strange words the Monsignor spoke so sincerely in Cy's and my favorite watering-hole, the Mimosa, a retro bar on Ponderosa. I recall him looking Cy in the eye and saying, ' Querido, in your situation, I would kill myself.'
We were both greatly struck that a religious man would say that, but one does not argue with a Monsignor that one's life belongs to God and one shouldn't take it. Anyway, not back then, in the Middle Ages of our twentieth century, when God was still around and a whole lot of Sin was put on his shoulders.
Cy, I thought, was pretty weighed down himself. Did he have thoughts of offing himself?
Who doesn't? Life wasn't always uplift for Cy, who in answer to the Monsignor mumbled in his cups how he would love to be rid of his life, only felt it should be in some way he wasn't aware of: certainly not actually climbing up on a chair and kicking it away or turning the knob in the kitchenette oven and putting a towel under the door. 'Heaven forfend, Father!' I remember staring at the back of the sign that hung motionless in the Mimosa's dark brown gothic window (BREAKFAST STEAKS, 75¢) and thinking it was more than a little sad that Saint Paul had grabbed Cy by so tender a spot in his character: that it was better to burn than marry! Paul was a Greek, and probably Queer. One shouldn't take him seriously. He had blinding hot flashes and an inside track on Revelation. But what if he was delusional? Just because one had bedded and wed too often, too capriciously and too thoughtlessly, that was no reason for Renouncing the world. It was Ophelia who, had she not drowned, would have been hied off to a nunnery; and Cy who. . . Well, Cy went a lot further than that! Dom Ambrose took after the original self-mutilator, Origen, and the skoptsi. There was a dream of being relieved of the flesh and its demands!
Does the Monsignor, even now on this motorized Cleopatrian barge, supplicate? Please kill yourself! Around true believers—a category that in my experience includes scholars, scientists, politicians, CEOs as well as those who cling to the Only True Doctrine—you have to watch out. They bring out the central issue of belief, faith if you will. Did Cy ever believe in himself? in anything he said or did?
Some people are untouchably themselves, complete with their blind sides, passions and piddling prejudices. I quote from the admirable Mr. William Trevor in a story I brought on this trip with me: 'She was a difficult woman, had been a willful child, a moody, recalcitrant girl given to flashes of temper; severity and suspicion came later.' Bingo! There you have it, the whole forever-fixed character. As I'm always me: stuck with my very short legs and a very big head, not much of a middle, a barrel chest and a patchy beard. That blinded old bugger, Lear, is one of us. He spent a lifetime mis-seeing the world about him. These monoliths are common. Their fixations stick out like Cyclops’ single eye. Think Oedipus, Quixote or Lenin.
Then there are the Cys of this world: fluctuating, middling, ever-changing sorts, like nebulae in space or the lizards of the chamaelonidae family. If you want to buy into one of those, you have to understand they are never exactly the same thing in one moment or the next, neither before nor after, nor even during.
He's worth your study. Look at him, presently a-smoke and glowing with words. Can you imagine him as lacking faith in himself? If he is not himself, which no actor of his class ever entirely is, whoever he believes himself to be will prevail. That's his secret. The single-minded haven't got that. God wants Dom Ambrose to grovel and Monsignor Moreno to supplicate. But Cy? If charm is called for, he has it; likewise if his character requires heroism, despair, megalomania, or the most minimal gestures, poses and sentiments of a woman, the lie of her head, the scented wrist below the watch, the thighs that hide what lies between them. How could he carry it off otherwise?
The positively skeletal Dom Ambrose McQuaerrie, OSB, stalks in his cowl, in his head-to-toe black, and chides his original self, Sir Cy Young, Bt., 'My son, when it comes to daily life, super-asceticism is a no-go.’ Was it not obvious? Neither doubt and nor flogging himself stopped Cy eating, drinking, smoking, or ogling, sniffing, tasting or touching up. The inner Sensualist was still operative. He was an All or Nothing man: annihilation of the Self and its basic drives, or immersion in the sacred waters of the bottle and the deep mysteries of womanhood. He wanted to quash the macho; the extent of his testosterone freaked him out; and yet his nature was amatory. Some conundrum.
Luckily, even in California, Salvation was to come his way: in the shape of a crazy Russian lady he met in Ye Olde Junk Shoppe. I was present with Cy, riffling through damp-rotting cardboard boxes for movie stills, a passing fancy of his when he was coming up to what promised to be a seedy seventh decade. Anastasia, or was it Irena? was nosing about among the tattered comics, much-thumbed Earle Stanley Gardners, rabbit-fur collars hanging on hooks, warped tennis rackets and such, when she came across four fragile miniature tea-cups for a doll's house, and decided she must have them. A remarkable instance of her genotype she was, though she had a cancer, I think, and a strong, silent husband who did something or other with advertising in Belgium. Once flaxen-haired, she was now steely. Her eyes were always wide open and an exacting, glaring blue; she was silence-free, big-butted, and crazy because she was entirely without inhibition and walked out of Ye Olde Junk Shoppe with the miniature cups and the oversized Cy.
Or am I mixing her up with the regular who drank steadily in a back booth by the Gents? She wore an old blue coat and accompanied her vodkas with obscene greasy food she extracted from waxed paper.
That particular night, the one during which Monsignor Moreno made light of Cy's very own Slough of Despond, Cy—on his way to relieve himself—worked his way back booth by booth, pawing the booth posts and their warm, reassuring wood. Then, when he reached her, he said: 'You think I should kill myself?'
She said 'maybe' in a Russian accent in which the vowels sounded like they came out of some deep chasm in her belly, like the last bit of a bath emptying, moh-bui.
Memory is unreliable, the present is fascinating. I sit in a wicker armchair and watch the musicians hired for the Great Occasion shuffle towards the smelly stern, bearing quarqaba, oud, qanun, nay, mazhor and tablah. I think warmly of the crazy Russian lady and her tiny tea-cups, but also that maybe Sir Cy really is running out of time, or too fast ahead of it.
Whatever the reason (a scene-change?), he has just done one of his magical disappearances, so I can reflect on Cy's dreams, which I think played a large part in his Identity problems. His were not the kind of dreams young girls have, in which rosy futures are displayed, draped in hazy gauze, but rather the hard nuts-and-bolts of the sub-conscious such as are made available to those who are not truly certain who or what they are.
continued on page 2 > |
